


What FIRST Robotics Will Look Like In The Future

by mistspren



Category: First Robotics Competition
Genre: Battlebots, Other, Robotics, but not actually related to it at all, i guess??, vaguely inspired by 17776
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-07-31
Packaged: 2018-12-09 11:03:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11667825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mistspren/pseuds/mistspren
Summary: What does the far future hold for FIRST Robotics Competition?





	What FIRST Robotics Will Look Like In The Future

2018: Retro-inspired game. Game pieces are cubes. People make Recycle Rush jokes.

2029: The Cheesy Poofs win Championships for the last time (the team is much later dissolved without having won again)

2035: Woodie Flowers dies

2036: Game a la Recycle Rush with no robot-to-robot contact in honor of Woodie Flowers

2041: Team number 17776 is passed

2047: FRC has a legitimate “water game” which takes place in a swimming pool. The Internet goes wild, until everyone realizes how difficult it is to build a robot which can successfully navigate a water environment and how many technical issues there are with the game, as well as how hard it is to find a suitable practice field. Also, the game is incredibly boring to watch. FRC memes are never quite the same after this.

2056: The first game where injuring opposing robots is legal (this rule change is not reversed for a long time)

2059: Battlebots is bought by FIRST and becomes the official “big brother” of FRC (FBB, where the BB stands for BattleBots rather than Big Brother, although the latter is a fortunate coincidence)

2074: A massive breakthrough in artificial intelligence is made, and non-experts are able to train highly adaptable machinery and programs in their own homes.

2075: FRC #16385 dominates the competition as early adopters of some of this adaptable AI

2076: FIRST scrambles to incorporate this innovation into the game rules. The first human-vs-robot game is created, where human players compete directly with fully autonomous robots.

2080s: Robots can consistently pass the Turing test without a great deal of effort on the part of their creators. It is popularly believed that true artificial intelligence has been achieved.

2091: FIRST has dropped to about 2,000 active teams, as robotics is now basically a trivial (although still high-budget) activity and people are getting bored.

2092: Maize Craze II is the game this year in honor of the 100th anniversary of FIRST. Robots cook meals made out of corn in a kitchen built in an FRC field. Judges determine points based off of the taste of the meals. It is widely unpopular.

2096: Christopher Smith becomes president of FIRST

2097: Every FIRST program is merged into one. The game, FIRST RES-Q II, is the first one to have a field larger than an acre. There is only one match played the entire season. Teams collaborate with their robots to rescue actual humans from an entire city which has been set aflame by the FTAs. Only a single alliance wins. However, the game is shut down before a winner is declared due to safety concerns.

2098: Christopher Smith is no longer president of FIRST, which is now committee-run. However, the level of public engagement in RESQ2 was so much higher than it had been for the average game that FIRST now has more funding than it knows what to do with. The committee decides to keep the single-match, giant-field, real-world structure of the game. The game this year is essentially a giant game of slightly more complicated capture-the-flag, where robots compete alongside humans.

2100s: Similar capture-the-flag style games are played. The field slowly grows, in both size and complexity, as well as length of play. The 2109 game is played on a 4-square-mile field in a forest, and human players and robots are in the forest for one week at a time.

2113: It is no longer possible to encapsulate the entire field in an otherwise unpopulated area. FIRST games begin taking place in cities and the countryside. Special rules are enacted to heavily penalize any harm to innocents. There are very few issues with this, which is surprising, given how bloodthirsty the game has become post-RESQ2.

2114: The first death during an FRC game as a direct result of the game takes place. Specifically, a robot kills a human while attempting to defend the flag of its alliance. This sparks a great deal of controversy, which grows into unrest. Why were none of the robotic deaths (or at least robotic deaths post-2075) a big deal? Why do the rules allow this? How much do robots have “life?” Do they have agency? Can they commit murder? Is it-

2115: FIRST panics a bit and rolls back the game. This year’s game is robot-on-robot, and the robots are very old-fashioned: no AI is permitted. The field is the size of fields in the 2010s. The game is two minutes and thirty seconds long. The game pieces are balls. There is a fifteen-second autonomous period. Human players feed pieces to the robots, who attempt to hit each other with balls in a dodgeball-esque game. The game takes place on the surface of the actual moon, which really resembles regolith. Robots use special wheels. People think it is utter lunacy. Everyone hates the game.

2116-2130: FIRST is on hiatus. Much political and social turmoil happens, focused around robot rights.

2131: An android president revives FIRST, in the style of the big games of the 2100s. Killing fellow players is highly discouraged by penalties in the game manual. The field is the entire continent of North America. The game is a month long. It is a tentative success: nobody dies.

2132: The Last Game is initialized.

  * There are two alliances: a red alliance and a blue alliance, in honor of years long past. However, each alliance contains half of the teams. At the end of the game, there is a winning _alliance_ and a winning _team_. All members of the winning alliance get a small trophy, bragging rights, and one ice cream cone per member.
  * Robots are treated equally to humans when it comes to team selection; the only restriction is that each team must contain at least one human player and one robot. Teams range in size from 2 to 150 members. (150 is the strict upper limit, due to the fact that team size highly influences success in some ways.) Teams register through the FIRST website. They are given numbers which are not currently in use, which includes retired numbers- FIRST has gotten tired of using such large numbers, as they are hard to remember.
  * There are a variety of ways to score points, which run the gamut of challenges: putting game pieces into certain containers, hacking into computer systems to retrieve keys, taking hostages from other teams, achieving political positions in a nation, supporting charitable causes, convincing other teams to join the game, finding hidden or rare items around the field, and costume design.
  * The game has no time limit. Teams may drop out at any time, and their score at this point is considered final. As long as the red alliance and blue alliance each contain at least one currently playing team, the game is ongoing.
  * The game is a huge success at first. A sports channel devotes itself to following the game at all times. This continues for several years. Eventually, it grows repetitive: large events in the game headline newspapers still, but the sports channel loses many of its viewers.
  * Teams become multitalented bands of nomadic mechatronic engineer-warriors. FIRST is no longer a sport or an educational activity, it is a lifestyle.



2135: The Red Alliance pulls ahead for the first time in several years.

2176: The Blue Alliance passes the Red Alliance, and is shortly passed again.

2177: The Blue Alliance passes the Red Alliance again. This time it sticks.

2232: The Game celebrates its 100-year anniversary.

(And it’s still going.)

**Author's Note:**

> i hope you liked this, you NERD who reads fanfiction about FRC (says the nerd who writes FRC fanfiction)  
> i may write more eventually on the state of the last game/the teams, and if i do i'll post it as a second chapter! let me know if you'd like to see this


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